People seem to have an insatiable appetite for food matters right now. Case in point: the public tickets for Edible Education 101 at UC Berkeley were snapped up in 12 minutes on Monday, according to a tweet from Alice Waters, who played a key role in bringing the curriculum to the university.

The 13-week course, co-taught by J-school professor and The Omnivore’s Dilemma author Michael Pollan, and Nikki Henderson, the executive director of People’s Grocery, a food justice organization in West Oakland, will examine the rise and future of the food movement. Student enrollment for the one-semester course also filled within minutes after it was listed online, as Berkeleyside reported earlier this month.

Why such interest? The class offers undergrads, grad students, and regular folk a chance to critique current food systems and dissect food politics with Pollan, Henderson, and Waters, as well as a slew of other big names in the food movement, including Marion Nestle and Eric Schlosser. The course kicks off with a lecture by Slow Food founder Carlo Petrini on August 30th. The class also coincides with the 40th anniversary celebration of Chez Panisse restaurant.

“UC Berkeley is my alma mater so I feel a real connection to the institution,” Waters explained to Berkeleyside earlier this week. “The opportunity arose to develop this course and we pulled this program together quickly. We also wanted to show our support for the university and public education.” Waters’ Chez Panisse Foundation (soon to be renamed The Edible Schoolyard Project) is footing the bill for the fall semester course to the tune of $30,000.

“I hope that students will have a stronger grasp of the concept that what we eat has consequences for our health, culture, and the environment,” Waters said, adding that she hopes that the course will continue beyond the fall.

If Waters is the iconic idealist and Pollan the affable academic, Henderson is the unapologetic activist. She’s also young (26), African-American, and spends her work days at a non-profit devoted to dealing with food security issues for low-income people of color.

Prior to coming to People’s Grocery 18 months ago, she worked for Slow Food USA and Green for All, the environmental organization co-founded by Van Jones. Not surprisingly, Henderson, who grew up with seven older foster brothers and two blood brothers in L.A., brings a different perspective and sensibility to the Berkeley bourgeois food scene.

Berkeleyside recently met Henderson for lunch — in Oakland — to learn more about why she decided to come to the table with Waters and Pollan.

Members of the People's Grocery team meet with Coalition of Immokalee Workers

How did your involvement with this course come about?

Well, the Chez Panisse Foundation came to me and asked me if I’d be interested in doing it. This class was important to me because it’s an opportunity to have a real exploration of the issues of race, power, class, and privilege in relation to food, which is something we do every day at People’s Grocery. When Chez Panisse approached me I told them I was only interested in teaching the course if we hit those bases and a good third of the curriculum does that.

It was also important for me that people speak for themselves. The whole class could have been taught by people who have written books about other people’s experiences. But we’ll have practitioners like the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (immigrant farm workers who have brought about historic changes for tomato farmers in Florida), for instance, who will come and tell their stories themselves. It’s important for the students to experience that, because one of the dynamics of not having privilege is that you don’t get to tell your own story. Those with means and access get to spend their time telling your story.

I wanted to ground the syllabus in the struggle for food justice and food security. There wouldn’t need to be a movement if there weren’t deep injustices happening and divisions within the movement. This college course explores the complexity of these issues within the context of the food movement.

How involved have Waters and Pollan been in shaping the curriculum?

Alice Waters really laid the groundwork for this to happen and her message is so consistent that you know what she’s going to say, so she just sort of gave me her marching orders and made a lot of suggestions, but then she just leaves it in your hands.

Michael wanted to make sure that the course was academically rigorous and that it involved deep, critical thought. He wanted the mix of practitioners and academics. He didn’t want it to be just a good conversation about the food movement but that there was a component that explored the complex question: what is there to do now?

They both made it clear since the beginning that they wanted me to feel it was very much my course too. And they’ve been generous with their time and expertise. Michael has been coaching me through putting the lecture series together. One piece of advice he gave me: don’t have the same format every week or people will fall asleep.

Can you tell us a little about your personal connection to food?

We grew up eating very healthy food. We ate home-cooked meals that consistently included a grain, a protein, and a vegetable, usually something like brown rice, baked chicken, and steamed broccoli. My mom was a kind of ’70s hippie, though I don’t think she’d classify herself as such. She is vegetarian and has a deep interest in health and nutrition, and she passed on those good habits to her children.

My great aunt and uncle were diabetic amputees. My aunt has the disease and my grandfather, who is no longer alive, almost lost his feet to the condition. With this exposure to diet-related diseases it hit me early on: what you eat is not something to play with.

What can young people interested in the food movement learn from those who have worked on this cause for decades?

There’s a lot of context that younger people need, of what’s actually happened so far in the food movement, like the current middle-class mainstream food movement is very much centered in an older struggle for food security and it’s important to have that context. You need to be grounded in the history. I’ve only been in the food movement the past three or four years and I’m well aware of how much there is to learn about what’s happened historically, so we in this younger generation can be truly effective in bringing about change. I want to soak up every bit of that in this course.

Is this the right time for this class?

It should have happened two years ago because the window of opportunity is closing. The mass media switches from one thing to the next pretty quickly and food has been hot for the last two years and it’s probably only going to be hot for another year or two and then it’s going to fade into the background. I’m going to do everything I can to move some things along while I can.

Photo: Rick Gilbert

Originally published on Berkeleyside

On Wednesday, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, farmer, poet and food movement hero Wendell Berry, physicist and seed-saving advocate Vandana Shiva, nutritionist and professor Marion Nestle, and His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales were among the speakers at The Future of Food, a conference put on by the Washington Post at Georgetown University.

The media was quick to focus on the comments by Prince Charles, who has been farming land on his Highgrove Estate for 26 years and selling produce under the name Duchy Originals, the profits of which are given to charities. But though the Prince gave a thorough and informed 45-minute speech about soil loss, the importance of biodiversity, and a critique of U.S. agriculture policy (you can read the whole speech here), some media and online comments focused on the perceived hypocrisy of the Prince as an environmentalist with a huge carbon footprint, and the old fall-back of detractors of the food movement: Elitism.

Chris Clayton, agriculture editor for The Progressive Farmer, tweeted “You just don’t make your case of what is needed in ag by tweeting “HRH Charles… His Royal Highness says. #FoF definitely #foodelitism”

Phillip Brasher, agriculture reporter for the Des Moines Register, didn’t use the word elitist, but used hyperbole to imply it. The title of his article: “Prince Charles: Save the world with organic farming.”

Elitism has been one of the hardest critiques for the good food movement to shake. For the last 50 years, conservative politicians have gained currency by slamming their opponents as elitist, pointy-headed liberals, and “nattering nabobs of negativism.” And food, which is often viewed as a liberal cause–even though conservatives are some of its biggest supporters–has become the latest hotbed for this fight (See Cookiegate). Making things more difficult, food is personal, habitual, and even addictive, and Americans are willing to cling to cheap food despite clear and present assessments about its toll on our health, our national deficit, and effects on our air and water.

Eric Schlosser, an investigative reporter and author of Fast Food Nation, among other books, kicked off the Future of Food event by saying:

Today, the chemical companies and the biotech companies like to dismiss organic food as something trendy or elitist. Well you know who needs organic food more than anyone else? …the two million farm workers who pick by hand almost all of the fresh fruits and vegetables in the United States. And their children need organic food, too. For them, the need for organics …is literally a matter of life and death. Pesticides are poisons. They have been carefully designed to kill insects, weeds, funguses and rodents. But they can also kill human beings. The Environmental Protection Agency has estimated that every year, 10,000-20,000 farmworkers in the United States suffer acute pesticide poisoning on the job, and that is probably a great understatement.

Though representatives from General Mills, Panera Bread, and the Grocery Manufacturers Association sat on panels, The Future of Food did bring together many known critics of the current food system. But the question is not whether the system should change, but how.

In fact, saying the system has to change should not be controversial. While the Farm Bureau and industry groups are preparing a PR campaign to change the consumer’s mind about industrial agriculture, it has become obvious that change must happen even at big corporations like Monsanto, Mars (which sponsored the event), and Walmart, which are all constantly trying to associate their image with sustainability. Meanwhile the price of oil is rising, the world water supply is becoming more tenuous, and extreme weather conditions and biofuel production contribute to food price spikes, all of which is leading to system collapse. Letting industry defend the current food system is akin to letting climate change deniers have a seat at the table while the science has long been settled.

Moreover, the two sides in this discussion are not equals. One is supported by an army of lobbyists and lawyers who shape legislation and feed talking points to the media. The other is an upstart with popular support based on overwhelming evidence that the system we have now is broken.

Just last week we saw what happens when you give too many industry spokespeople the stage at a similar event, put on by The Atlantic magazine. That event was sponsored by DuPont, Dole, Coca-Cola, and the Council for Biotechnology Information, a group funded by the industry. Each got to place staffers on the panels in return for funding. What resulted was a biased panel on “sustainable agriculture” that focused heavily on one thing: biotechnology. It also featured a panel on obesity, during which a Dole staffer and an American Beverage Association spokesperson marginalized the debate to focus on things like soda can sizes. Dr. Zeke Emmanuel, Chair of the Clinical Center Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health, struggled to move the conversation toward discussing deeper solutions to the problem.

While bloggers lamented these biases, and asked whether or not this was what it takes to stay afloat as an independent magazine publisher, The Atlantic event was not a complete loss. White House chef and policy adviser Sam Kass spoke. The event also featured Alice Waters, who tweeted before taking the stage that, “The true elitism is a food system controlled by a handful of corporations,” and sent out a photo of the refreshments table, which featured bottles of Coke.

The Future of Food event instead featured a delicious lunch prepared by Bon Appétit Management Company, a locally-sourced and organic-committed caterer. But aside from the food served, the main critique I have of both of these events is their lack of deep, meaningful debate. For The Atlantic event, the debate was stunted by industry, for The Future of Food, there were too many people on each panel and a lack of time and direction by some of the moderators. And both events lacked diversity and youth voices. The Future of Food took place on a college campus, and yet the students who showed up didn’t stay after Prince Charles spoke. Indeed, the event could have been better publicized if the goal was to engage students on Georgetown’s campus.

If we are going to sit together in a room and discuss the finer points of food policy, we need to have real, solid debates and solutions. It’s time we get down to brass tacks about genetically modified foods, antibiotics in livestock agriculture, health concerns surrounding pesticide use, and other subjects, featuring scientists and those unassociated with industry. We need to talk about the barriers to producing research when it is missing, the consolidation in the industry and how this effects choices, and bring more farmers into these discussions to speak for themselves.

Otherwise, we should be rolling up our sleeves to build new models for food access. Dr. Hans Herren, a scientist and lead author of the IAASTD report, who was on a panel about international food policy, said it succinctly when he pointed out that we need to stop talking and writing reports and do something. “The time to act was yesterday,” he said.

Writing new policies will also help put to bed the tired old argument of whether or not organic vegetables are elitist. “Smart sustainable food policy is common sense,” said Senator Jon Tester in the closing keynote at The Future of Food. “And if you fight for it, you can win.”

In the end, calling those who want to change the food system elitist is merely a way of diverting our attention from the very real problems we face. In an opinion piece last week, Eric Schlosser wrote:

This name-calling is a form of misdirection, an attempt to evade a serious debate about U.S. agricultural policies. And it gets the elitism charge precisely backward. America’s current system of food production—overly centralized and industrialized, overly controlled by a handful of companies, overly reliant on monocultures, pesticides, chemical fertilizers, chemical additives, genetically modified organisms, factory farms, government subsidies and fossil fuels—is profoundly undemocratic. It is one more sign of how the few now rule the many. And it’s inflicting tremendous harm on American farmers, workers and consumers.

Photo: AP

Here we are again, right at the starting gate of awards season, and the designer gowns, flash bulbs and red carpets are adding a bit of bling to the dark winter Hollywood nights.  Further up the coast in San Francisco, this year unveiled a truly unique, Bay Area-style awards ceremony dedicated not to glamour and celebrity but to pure, just, and delicious food. 

The first annual Good Food Awards set out to proclaim the very best of our nation’s small batch food products and producers.  The idea was hatched by Seedling Projects Executive Director Sarah Weiner, who ceaselessly strives to discover, share and promote regional food endeavors with a sustainable, yet global view. The seven categories (Coffee, Charcuterie, Cheese, Beer, Pickles, Preserves, Chocolate) gleaned 780 products from around the country in which 80 judges painstakingly chose 71 award winners who all gathered at an awards ceremony on January 14, 2011 to hear the results.  The over 400 attendees wore perhaps less Gucci and diamonds, more Frye boots and button snaps, but nonetheless the glitterati of the artisan food world applauded these winners in one of the hotbeds of food chic that is the Ferry Building.

The queen bee herself, Alice Waters stepped to the mike to provide the ultimate honor for these winners.  She discussed the simple fact that we were celebrating the efforts from 26 states in the country, an encouraging reality of progressive food diversity, and that it is vital to “re-imagine and reinvigorate” food on a national level.   She also pointed out that “these awards are valuing excellence” and they can serve as a tool to educate us about what products go beyond only taste, capturing a “purity of providence” to fully showcase good, clean, and fair.  “It’s a beautiful thing that we can spread the word about goodness,” she concluded, when we are so used to hearing bad news about our broken food system.

The evening was followed by several sincere and heartfelt speeches, reminding us all why we care about good food the way we do.  The bevy of presenters also helped articulate how these chosen producers have acted as stewards by dedicating their lives to taking the road less traveled in a genuine way, creating products that are not only savored in flavor, but that promote social and environmental responsibility as well.

After raising our glasses of Macintosh hard cider, we descended upon the halls of the Ferry Building to taste the actual winning goods, the first of many events in which these foods and their artisan methods are being highlighted throughout Good Food Month.  The following day, the Good Food Marketplace provided the chosen finalists an opportunity to reach a broader audience by selling their products at the Saturday morning farmers market, a bustling celebration of all Good things.

For an insider take on the festivities, Executive Director Sarah Weiner posted her thoughts here.

These days, we hear more and more about our food system in crisis: contamination, obesity, poor distribution, and environmental devastation.  To combat some of these issues, the school garden is a growing trend that aims to teach our kids a more direct connection to their food and eating habits.  It’s actually not a new concept.  During World War I and II, motivated by scarcity and national security issues, schools  became major suppliers of fresh produce.  Our government began the U.S. School Garden Army, promoting fruit and vegetable production, consumption, and health.  But now the format has entered modern times, up against modern ailments and a larger population.

It is one thing to plant a few sunflowers with Kindergarteners and another to install, maintain, and implement nutrition, cooking, and ecological curriculum that ensure a lasting impact on the students.  It’s not as easy as just planting some tomatoes and hoping our kids will get the message. We’ve all encountered a neglected schoolyard, tangled weeds and scorched earth, with evidence of good intention but stunted momentum.  To really hit home on the important seed to fork lessons a school garden can deliver, it takes tons of work, planning, thought, and consistency…a home garden times one hundred or more.  The hurdles involved are also great, from our national policies, to funding, to actual space available within our country’s concrete landscapes.

But today we also have more resources promoting the school garden concept.  Lesson plans, non-profit organizations, grants, teacher workshops, and consulting opportunities get us closer to creating these Growing Classrooms more efficiently and with a broader reach.  We also finally have some definitive research to back up our claims that these school gardens will work towards creating a healthier food system for generations to come.

In 2004, The School Lunch Initiative was launched in Berkeley, California.  The Initiative, which aims to integrate cooking and gardening into regular school programming and food, is a collaboration between the public school district’s 11 elementary and 3 middle schools, Alice Water’s Chez Panisse Foundation and the Center for Ecoliteracy.  However, after being met with criticism and arguments about the project’s validity, the Chez Panisse Foundation decided to fund The School Lunch Initiative Evaluation Project that was released in June of this year.

This academic study conducted by UC Berkeley researchers is one of the first to thoroughly examine a fully functioning school garden program within a public school system. This lack of scientific evidence is due, in part, to the difficulty involved in quantifying the multi-layered variables, time, and sophistication within the diverse samples of school food and garden projects. Some focus only on the environment, some on nutrition, some on public school menu changes, but until now there has been little evidence that looks at models of successful integration within all the tenants of this issue.

Over the course of three years (fall of 2005 to spring of 2009) 238 students were followed as they moved from the fourth and fifth grades into middle school to determine the effects of The Initiative as it was being implemented. The method was to track students’ development over time within a critical age group, broken up between highly developed food programs and less developed ones within the Berkeley school system (all under the School Food Initiative, which has required healthier food choices, a school garden, on-site cooking education, and professional development for teachers). It is important to note that the schools receiving more exposure to the Initiative programming generally have lower income students, while the schools with less assistance have higher income families enrolled.

The reason this age group was chosen is because studies have indicated that as we move into middle school and our teens, food choices become less healthy, which may lead to poor eating habits as we enter adulthood. U.S. adolescents eat about 3.5 servings of fruits and vegetables a day, according to the USDA, as opposed to the recommended seven to eight. This statistic points to the importance of sustained garden and cooking education in middle schools to create a lasting impact. The researcher’s evidence documented an increase in fruit and vegetable servings by 1.5 for fifth graders at the highly developed schools. The less developed schools showed a decrease by 0.4 servings.

There was also a concerted effort to mirror the ethnic and economic diversity of Berkeley public schools within the study, as stated by the authors, “The heterogeneity of the student population is due to Berkeley’s long-standing efforts at integrating its schools. In 1968, the Berkeley Unified School District became the first major school district in the nation to voluntarily integrate its schools. Today, a school assignment plan based upon race, ethnicity, parent education and parent income level aims to bring a diverse mix of students into each Berkeley school.”

One main finding was that parents reported much healthier eating habits in their kids. More than half of the families involved in the study reported eating dinner together every day, and 35 percent of parents with kids in the highly developed School Lunch Initiative schools saw a noticeable improvement in their children’s food choices as opposed to 16 percent in the less developed Initiative schools.

There was also strong evidence that students had increased knowledge of nutrition when exposed to higher levels of Initiative programming (cooking and gardening), specifically in seventh graders in year three with a five percent increase in nutrition scores over the previous year. Not only did the kids know more about fresh produce, they actually started to prefer it, notably in the first year of exposure. The preference was sustained, specifically for leafy greens, following them all the way into middle school.

By year three, the older kids at the highly developed Initiative middle schools displayed a positive attitude about their lunch program, food choices, in-season produce, and ideas that our eating habits can help or hurt the environment. In short, they got it…

The study was also to determine how to enhance, change, and replicate this kind of programming on a wider scale. Obvious recommendations included continuing these kinds of integrated school garden programs, ensuring regular attendance by hiring paid staff, and maintaining the programs into middle schools to reach kids as they move into their teens. The report also suggested adding components that include parents and community members, finding ways to improve the quality of foods brought from home (not just for lunch but for larger events, fundraisers, etc.), and increasing physical activity during the garden and cooking lessons to promote exercise.

On a policy and research level, there needs to be more understanding of how the parents and children view the school meals and what they are actually consuming in order to create strategies that ensure more participation. Also, future assessment of cost and replicability of the School Garden Initiative needs to occur to determine feasibly spreading the model on a wider scale. And finally, the study suggested broadening the age group to look at much younger kids all the way into high school to really analyze the impact of these garden programs for the future.

Photo: Life Lab Science Program in Santa Cruz, CA

Don’t judge a book by its cover, they say. Well, I’m guilty. When I first glanced at Janet A. Flammang’s The Taste for Civilization, I was simultaneously smitten by the lovely image of a few leaves of arugula caught on a fork, roots and soil still clinging to the slender green leaves, and daunted by the subtitle: “Food, Politics and Civil Society”. Having been engaged in just those three topics for the past several years in a number of capacities—as a teacher, farmer, garden program designer, national program advocate and traveler, to name a few—I had a hard time imagining how one slim volume would tackle, much less try to build a cohesive argument while engaging with, the entire complex web of our food system. I turned the page and began reading, and almost immediately I saw that I had in fact, for once, correctly judged a book by its cover.

Flammang is an articulate writer and a skilled academic. Her book draws upon a tremendous range of sources, from interviews with community members and farmers to high-level intellectual thought from philosophers, political scientists, sociologists, epidemiologists… suffice it to say, she’s done her homework.

I found myself nodding my head in agreement as she declares that we, as a society, must make more room for “food work”—anything that must be done in order to grow, purchase, prepare and consume food—and that the skills picked up when one regularly sits and eats at the table with friends and family—conversation, manners, food culture, family and community cohesion, etc.—are inarguably valuable to building active citizens and healthy eaters. And yet, as I read, I had the distinct sense that Flammang was writing this book more because she personally loves food and the booming local and sustainable agriculture movement than because she found one central point worth defending.

My skepticism that Flammang was attempting to tackle too much in one book proved deserved. She did indeed try to tackle the whole of our interaction with the enormous topics of food, agriculture, civic engagement and eating culture with far-reaching umbrella titles including “Household Foodwork”, “Table Conversation”, “One Woman’s Revolution”, and “Community Food”. In enthusiastic agreement with her points, I too use food as a lens to criticize gender roles in domestic and career life, to urge us to slow down in this fast-paced society, to encourage deeper engagement in our communities rather than our cell phones and iPads. And her historical explorations were, if familiar to me, fascinating nonetheless. Recipes from early American cookbooks, tracing crops that have moved across cultures and made their way into the hodge-podge of American food culture, studies documenting the myriad benefits of sharing a meal with family and community members all engaged and interested me.

However, her arguments stretched too far. Take Flammang’s discussion of food systems reform as an avenue for change in all aspects of our daily lives, for example. Though I share with Flammang an imagined nostalgia for the days when victory gardens produced a significant percentage of Americans’ fruits and vegetables, I acknowledge that we live in a changed time, when the cost of living is markedly more (even if you do opt a simpler lifestyle than that which our consumer culture advocates). The realities of rapid urbanization, population growth, real estate speculation and suburban sprawl are threatening our ability to procure land on which to grow food, no matter how adamantly we want to produce food more self-sufficiently. And though I wholeheartedly agree that hunger is a tremendous issue in the U.S. today, I happen not to think that that Alice Waters’ “delicious revolution” (a central, seemingly pet subject, of the book) included hunger and social justice as some its core tenants in the days of its inception, nor do I think Waters was the original organic, local food pioneer. How about our elderly gardeners that never stopped using natural methods to produce food in vacant lots, backyards, and containers, many of whom are non-white and grew food out of necessity, not a desire to reform the system.

When it came time to conclude, I hadn’t been swayed in any particular direction. It seemed Flammang had spend so much time reaching into as many corners of our society’s food and agriculture, past and present, that she lost her focus. I finished each chapter feeling as though it belonged on its own, as an academic article or, better yet, simplified into an editorial for wider consumption.

But let me be perfectly blunt. Perhaps more than anything, Flammang’s writing is undeniably colored by a sense of place, a very particular place: Santa Clara, California. Now I’m a born and bred New Yorker, and so perhaps there’s a bit of coastal competition at this point’s core. But having traveled extensively in my work with food, both in the U.S. and internationally, I find that increasingly, the Californian arguments (particularly those hailing from within driving distance of the Bay Area) are only tangentially relevant to many of the rest of us. If I had only ever experienced food work in a political climate that normalizes the radical and comes coupled with near-perfect growing conditions (which allow for year-round local sourcing of food), I too might find it appropriate to preach that buying local, gardening and taking time to cook Chez Panisse style are the key to social change. But I don’t. I live in a city of nearly 9 million people whose sprawling suburbs have managed to deaden once thriving farmland, and continue to do so at an alarming rate. And, though I do believe reform in food and agriculture as crucial components to changing our health, environment and city-scapes, after having spent time working with agriculture and sustainability initiatives in impoverished regions of South Africa, Brazil and Turkey in the last few years (not to mention our own pockets of near third-world poverty, which include Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn; Detroit and Flint, Michigan; rural Oregon; and Newark, New Jersey), I find myself more and more frustrated that our arguments (and in this case, Ms. Flammang’s) aren’t harder-hitting, more precise and more willing to engage with the uncomfortable and terribly complex issues of race and class in our food system specifically, and society overall.

If we’re going to talk about civil society, we need to focus on promoting reform that doesn’t shy away from more explicit focus on access to land and food in terms of cost, location and cultural appropriateness. I’m reminded of just how relevant these rifts in cultural perception and experience are in my day to day as I work with at-risk youth in Brooklyn. My understanding of and passion for food systems work comes from a different place than my students’, and the issues that drive my daily decisions are not the same as those that do theirs. Turning off the TV during dinner won’t make broken families whole again, nor will demanding fewer work hours in order to promote cooking at home help struggling families earn the money they need in order to purchase good food. Though I found Flammang’s writing engaging and well researched, I’m ready for us, particularly those of us with resources, media outlets and time to articulate our views in writing, to stop focusing on the feel-good benefits that make food reform so palatable.

The academy has its place, but when it comes to re-engaging our youth, reviving our agriculture and dealing with the abysmal state of health—both of individuals and communities—in the U.S. today, we need to get out into the world and into the dirt. We’ve got a lot to dig through.

I was amazed when I opened my New York Times yesterday, after a busy Sunday working at the café. The first face I saw when I pull the paper out of its blue plastic wrapper was that of Alice Waters, gracing the cover of the Sunday Business section. The superb accompanying article by Andrew Martin raises the question of whether the sustainable food movement is ready for the visibility it is getting these days.

According to the article, Michael Pollan doesn’t think so:

Mr. Pollan, who contributes to The New York Times Magazine, likens sustainable-food activists to the environmental movement in the 1970s. Though encouraged by the Obama administration’s positions, he worries that food activists may lack political savvy.

“The movement is not ready for prime time,” he says. “It’s not like we have an infrastructure with legislation ready to go.”

While I entirely agree with him, I think this is perhaps the wrong question. My question is: does a grass-roots movement that is focused on re-localization and de-centralization of our food system need a centralized infrastructure in the first place?

Consider this: currently over 85% of large food manufacturing companies have a sustainability program in place. While it is certainly true that they are primarily focusing on “Sustainability 1.0” programs of waste and energy reduction, the fact is that Big Food is starting to take notice. And the reason they are taking notice is because people are increasingly choosing the most sustainable and green products that they think they can afford.

And this is why the NYT Sunday Business section decided to devote a full page and a half to the topic – because sustainable food is the food of the future. From my perspective, that makes the question a tautology. The cover of the Sunday Business section is prime time.

As is the recent 60 Minutes profile of Alice Waters that was discussed in the article. Her segment was followed by a deluge of discussion online and on the airwaves about the role she has played in creating this movement.

Lesley Stahl began the piece with a loaded statement, saying “When it comes to food, Alice Waters is a legend. At age 64, she has done more to change how we Americans eat, cook and think about food than anyone since Julia Child.” Provocative stuff, for a foodie.

Personally, I believe that Ms. Stahl is right. I was born in the same month that Chez Panisse opened, in August of 1971.  Nearly four decades later, I now run a café less than two miles from that honored institution. In that time I have seen first-hand how fresh local hand-crafted food has gone from being a fringe-of-the-fringe movement to where we are now.

As a infant and small child, I lived on a farm commune in the California foothills.  Later, my Mom bought a small farm on the outskirts of Sacramento, where we raised rabbits and chickens for food, and had a mixed vegetable and fruit garden year round.  Growing up, eating locally wasn’t a way of life or a political statement, it simply meant harvesting the days eggs and vegetables, maybe skinning a rabbit to roast, and perhaps pulling some apples or winter squash stored in the shed.

Being a farmer was definitely not culturally accepted where I lived.  As a child I didn’t appreciate it much – especially when asked to explain the roasted rabbit leg in my lunch bag during elementary school.  A rabbit leg was definitely a 4^th grade conversation stopper.  And my sister and I would get heckled, even pelted with stones, by passers-by when we would forget to change out of our knee-high mud boots before going to the local store.

We sold our eggs door to door around the neighborhood, to the Sacramento Natural Foods Coop, and later to a new crop of gourmet markets that were opening up in the early 1980’s. I remember clearly one spring when one of these markets asked if we could harvest our vegetables smaller. Smaller, we asked? Yes, they said, the new trend was for baby vegetables. We happily obliged. It wasn’t until much later that I learned this trend was in no small part the result of Alice Waters’ personal taste for Chez Panisse.

The impact of Waters’ choices has been discussed and dissected at great length in various articles and books. But I personally think that it is simply that she has kept her vision true and steady for so many years that her impact is so great. Restaurants come and go in America, even the great ones. A great 40-year old restaurant is a rare thing, indeed. And to have a venerated restaurant that forged long-standing relationships with farmers, ranchers and foragers directly has done more than a little to raise the respect they receive. Little by little. Year by year.

After university I specialized in tropical biology and worked and lived for about ten years in some of the most remote places on the globe, and I savored the local foods wherever I went.  In Brazil I feasted on flank steak from a cow butchered fresh that morning.  In Hawaii I spent the day digging a hole and slow roasting stuffed wild boar.  In Cameroon I learned to appreciate wild porcupine stew.  I lived with people naturally in their small villages while studying the local ecology, and ate what they ate.

It was the Cameroonian Baka and the forest they live in that truly changed my appreciation for food.  One of the world’s oldest surviving hunter-gatherer peoples, the Baka became my friends and guides in the African forest for nearly two years.  For my Masters research, I spent thousands of hours looking through binoculars and scopes observing natural animal feeding behavior.

One day, my Baka guide Michelle came across some edible wild fruit, and started gorging himself on them.  I ate a few – deep red, juicy like an orange, and flavored like a vitamin-C bomb in your mouth – delicious.  I then asked if we shouldn’t bring some back for the rest of the camp.  He laughed, and said “No, if they are here today they are everywhere tomorrow.  Enjoy them like the birds you’ve been watching.  Mangez comme les oiseaux. Eat like the birds.” Eat what is in season. Now. There is no reason to wait, he was saying.

Many years later, my life has come full circle.  Now I can offer rabbit legs for lunch at a popular café without scorn.  My farming childhood has become culturally accepted and even admired – a radical departure from my youth.

The fact that a festival like Slow Food Nation could have been created is due in large part to those various social / cultural forces I have lived with all my life – only now they are starting to become integrated from the edge to the mainstream.

And I know that this integration, which I appreciate so dearly, is possible in no small part to that restaurant born in the same month as me back in 1971 on a sleepy street in Berkeley.  (Thanks Alice).

Alice Waters is taking a lot of heat in blogger land of late. From The Feedbag’s question “Has the locavore taliban finally been checked?” to NPR’s Monkey See blogger Todd Kliman noting Alice’s “inflexible brand of gastronomical correctness” to Anthony Bourdain’s equating her with the Khmer Rouge (I mean, can you see Alice carrying an 8.5 pound AK 47 when she couldn’t even do the Heimlich maneuver on Joan Nathan?) Alice is getting shredded in the Cuisinart of the Anti-Politically Correct. And some people would say, rightly so. Apparently, her local food obsessive-slightly fascistic behavior and precious organic-y grandeur has rubbed the wrong kind of salt into the wrong people’s wounded sense of self-righteous apathy.

In an article in the Washington Post this past Sunday, Jane Black, who wrote rather glowingly about the Kumbaya-ness of the Slow Food Nation event that took place in San Francisco back in August 2008, now seems to have turned a more specious eye upon the pre-inaugural dinners organized by Alice Waters in Washington DC. Thrown by private citizens in private homes, celebrity chefs (such as Daniel Boulud, Tom Colicchio, Lidia Bastianich, Floyd Cardoz, Nancy Silverton, Rick Bayless, José Andrés, Dan Barber) came in from around the country to cook on the Monday night before the Inauguration as a way to raise much needed funds for two Washington soup kitchens, Martha’s Table and DC Central Kitchen, and also FRESHFARM Markets, the organization that supports farmers’ markets in the Washington DC region. The dinners have received criticism for being at best irrelevant, at worst, down right elitist.

Patrick Martins, founder of Heritage Foods USA, who was at the infamous Joan Nathan dinner (and no, he didn’t see Colicchio perform the Heimlich maneuver on Ms. Nathan), just shakes his head upon hearing these petty Alice criticisms. “Whoever is saying these things, they should take a good look in the mirror and ask themselves, can they do better? No one else is stepping up to the plate.”

In the Wa Po article “Go Slow Foodies. It’s the Way to Win,” Black started the ball rolling by asking: “Can the combination of Barack Obama and a $500-a-plate meal of grass-fed beef in a rustic guajillo chili sauce and a warm tart of local apples and pears change the world? Or at least the way America eats?”

Can you guess what I am going to write next? Yes It Can!

On WNYC’s The Leonard Lopate Show, editor-in-chief of Gourmet magazine Ruth Reichl and food writer for the New York Times Kim Severson discussed the implications, ramifications and machinations of the Alice Waters Inaugural Dinners.

Reichl was part of the committee, or “kitchen cabinet” as like might call themselves, (along with Waters and Danny Meyer) that organized these dinners and was happy to go on Leonard’s show if for no other reason than to tell the naysayers who cry “Elitism!” that eating good food is not an elitist act, that good food should be had by all, and the best way to get that message across is to take it to the kitchens of Washington DC.

Reichl said on the air: “When I started writing about food in this country, nobody seemed to care. And so it’s very exciting that people now care.”

So who cares? And what does that mean? It is easy to dismiss these green apple gelee and celery root remoulade glorified meals as oh so rococo and, to some cynics, a bit Marie Antoinette-ish, but at their heart (sunchoked if you will) there is substance to these dinners that can’t be blithely washed away with a decent bottle of ‘93 Hermitage.

In fact, a good many people of influence, media and otherwise were at these parties (Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward, Mora Liason, Rachel Maddow just to name a few) along with Obama-ites like Zeke Emmanuel, Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel’s older brother and Chair of the Department of Bioethics at the NIH who came straight from celebrating with the Obamas to sit next to Reichl at Nancy Silverton’s dinner. Presumably these dinners, which received quite a bit of media attention, have started a conversation about food in this country that might now be on the radars of mainstream media in the future.

So if people care, then what are they going to do about it? Reichl asks that elephant-in-the-room question of the day: “how can we change things in this country so it’s not something that happens to rich people but is instead a prerogative for everyone in the country?”

Per Black’s article, the complaints continue: “They don’t have a central, core message,” says James Thurber, an expert on lobbying and the director of American University’s Center on Congressional and Presidential Studies. “What policy are they trying to change?”

Reichl’s answer: “We want to change it all! Who doesn’t think obesity is a problem or pesticides is a problem and social justice for farm workers is a problem — these are all things that need to be changed and many feel that the opportunity is finally in sight.”

Liz Falk, DC markets manager of FRESHFARM Markets, one of the recipients of the funds raised that evening, said this: “Recognizing that the lack of focus of the local food movement is understandable since food is so ubiquitous at every level, from policy, society and fair access issues, to business and support of small family farms, to the environmental impact… it is difficult to know where to start. And as such, we should want a whole lot more than validation from the White House and President Obama.”

Back on The Lopate Show, Kim Severson commented that she feels a larger food movement is afoot, “a second food revolution is in the air. Everything he [Obama] eats has been scrutinized. They all think Obama is their guy. I think they are overly optimistic but I know a lot of progress has been made.”

Reichl made a pass at one specific change this fall by supporting a letter written by Alice Waters last fall asking the Obamas to consider a change of guard in the White House kitchen. Both she and Waters and others were asking for a chef that uses local and organic foods. But the Obamas decided to stay with the chef already in the White House kitchen, Cristeta Comerford, and, as it turns out, Comerford has been cooking with organic foods all along for the Bushes. Oops.

Much bru-ha-ha has since been made that Reichl and the Gang were, to quote former White House Executive Chef Walter Scheib, treating Comerford like “so many pounds of chopped liver.”

Reichl had her chance to respond on the show.

“No one is beating up on her. The point of the letter was not that she wasn’t a great chef but that the position should be rethought, that it should be redefined as a bully pulpit who can talk about good food….They didn’t talk about the Bush’s eating organic food … They hid it and that’s the point. They were afraid they would be seen as elitist… This is a country that feeds their children pure junk while the President eats organic food. He didn’t want to say he was eating so much better than anyone else.”

And just yesterday, New York Times writer Marian Burros came out with the surprise announcement that yes indeed, Sam Kass, the 28 year old founder of Inevitable Table, a private chef service in Chicago, has joined the White House kitchen. His work with local, sustainable food should please even someone as picky as Alice Waters.

So as for the Bush’s Let-Them-Eat-Industrialized, Mercury-Tainted-High-Fructose-Corn Syrup-Cake philosophy, let’s hope the Obamas request the cake be made with organic flour.

Photo: JonBauer

The new Dining Commons at the Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School in Berkeley, California – feeding students since August – opened its doors to the community on Saturday to show off the latest phase of a revolutionary approach to school lunch. For the first time, several hundred parents, teachers, local food activists and assorted politicians – including Mayor Tom Bates, Assemblywoman Loni Hancock, Assemblyman Mark DeSaulnier and Congresswoman Barbara Lee – could sit together in this extraordinary new building and share an ordinary school lunch: lentil soup, grilled chicken with roasted root vegetables, green salad and bread, fresh fruit. They paid $100 apiece for the privilege (the proceeds going to support the program). Students pay anywhere from 40 cents to $3.50 for a comparable meal (depending on family income).

Alice Waters first proposed the dining commons, sited between the gym and the baseball diamond, almost 10 years ago. It was originally slated to open in 2005 – which was probably unrealistic all along. Then 2006 rolled by, then 2007….I had started documenting construction with time-lapse ambitions, but I could go months at a time without clicking the shutter and not miss anything. The project reflected all the contradictions and hopes of school lunch as an emblem of our food culture: the absurdity of the official “nutritional” rules; the dire funding and related staff shortages; the increasingly scary links between diet and health, especially for children – and the weird knowledge that what had to change quickly wasn’t going to. Not even at the King school, which is home to The Edible Schoolyard, a hands-on organic gardening and cooking program that’s supported by Waters’ Chez Panisse Foundation (of which I’m a board member). It had come to seem almost normal that sixth, seventh and eighth graders who were learning about biodiversity, the science of composting, and the central role of agriculture in ancient civilizations, not to mention planting, harvesting and cooking food from the school’s one-acre garden – were getting a school-district-wide menu of microwaved chicken nuggets.

No more, thanks to the incredible efforts of Ann Cooper – aka Chef Ann, aka the Renegade Lunch Lady, and officially Director of Food Services for the Berkeley Unified School District. In addition to offering breakfast and lunch to King’s roughly 1,000 students, the Dining Commons is also the new central kitchen for the entire BUSD, comprising about 10,000 students. “We’re serving 8,300 meals a day from this kitchen,” Cooper told the Saturday gathering. “No trans fats, no high fructose corn syrup, whole grains, fresh fruits and vegetables.” So far, about 70 percent of what she purchases comes from the West Coast corridor, and about 30 percent from within 150 miles. Almost everything is cooked from scratch. (For more info, go to http://www.schoollunchinitiative.org)

On Saturday, the mood seemed one of euphoric disbelief (sound familiar?) as Cooper and her staff, plus devoted volunteers, began bringing out lunch and Waters and Congresswoman Lee took the microphone by turns to tell the story of how the funding and the vision for the project came together. We were sitting in front of an open kitchen, in a dining room saturated with natural light (and windows that open!); under a vaulted, wood-beamed ceiling; on reclaimed-wood benches and stools at reclaimed-wood tables (nothing nailed to the floor!); with a china plate, a glass and silverware in front of each of us. We were at the children’s table. It felt remarkable. In fact, said a woman sitting next to me, it felt “like a miracle.” Of patience and determination, surely.

After 10 days of incredible action—sod removal, bed and ground preparation, installation of irrigation lines and fencing, the building of a fantastic soap box—the lawn in front of San Francisco’s City Hall was transformed into the Slow Food Nation Victory Garden. It was a perfect planting day as 150 volunteers helped moved nearly 4,000 plants into their new homes. Teams divided into zones with their leaders and peacefully planted lettuce, tomatoes, beans, herbs, flowers and so much more. Good thoughts and prayers (including those from the next-door religious meeting) were had by all. Together, we built a “garden of communities,” as Victory Garden Manager John Bela calls it. Bela and Willow Rosenthal, founder of City Slicker Farms, in West Oakland, where the seedlings were started, joined Slow Food Nation Executive Director Anya Fernald and Founder Alice Waters to welcome Mayor Gavin Newsom to the garden.

The Mayor and Alice planted lettuce together in the garden and each spoke of the need for a sustainable food system, with the Victory Garden being just the first step to creating a national goal of making fresh, local food available to everyone. With an emphasis on good food being a universal birthright, they championed the myriad individuals, organizations and City departments involved in making the Slow Food Nation Victory Garden possible, and called for continued leadership and stewardship for such programs.

The day was glorious in its simplicity: take an urban plot of land and make it green. Meet your neighbor and do good. Grow food for people in need. These are all part of the vision and mission of Slow Food Nation to bring good, clean and fair food to all. Come join us this summer at the Victory Garden and at Slow Food Nation.

We are extremely grateful to our partners on this project:

Garden for the Environment’s Victory Gardens 2008+ Program, CMG Landscape Architecture, City Slicker Farms and Seeds of Change;

The Mayor’s Office, the Department of Public Works, the Department of the Environment, the Department of Recreation and Parks and Norcal Waste Management;

Lyngso Garden Materials, Earth Savers, Bountiful Gardens, Cole Hardware and Demeter USA;

Food & Water Watch, the Presidio Native Plant Nursery, The Presidio Trust, Alemany Farm, Friends of the Urban Forest, Ploughshares Nursery, the Urban Permaculture Guild and the San Francisco Food Bank;

S.F. Beautiful and New Resource Bank;

Katrina Heron, our Board Chair, who has shown enormous leadership – and was the first to have vision of creating the Victory Garden in Civic Center plaza;

Whole Foods Market, lead partner of the Victory Garden, which provided us with a delicious Victory Garden planting breakfast;

Bon Appetite Management Company, which prepared an outstanding and beautiful lunch for nearly 200 people on Civic Center plaza, and whose Google Café prepared lunch for hundreds of volunteers over the 10 day installation period;

Sunset Magazine, lead Media Partner of the Victory Garden;

And last, but not at all least, the countless hours spent by volunteers, including Slow Food Nation staff, on creating a vital, living and breathing garden in the center of San Francisco.

Photos by Scott Chernis